Druids
A druid (Gaulish: druides, from Proto-Celtic *druwides, 'oak-knower' or '[priest with] strong insight') was a member of the learned class of the ancient Celtic peoples of Gaul and Britain, described by Greek and Roman writers as a priest, teacher, judge and custodian of religious and legal tradition. Because the druids committed nothing of their teaching to writing and cannot be securely identified in the archaeological record, almost everything known about them comes from outside observers.
Classical authors placed the druids only in Gaul and Britain, never among the other Celtic-speaking peoples. The earliest notices, of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, treat them as 'barbarian' philosophers akin to the Persian magi and the Indian gymnosophists. Much of the surviving material descends from the lost ethnography of Posidonius, and the fullest account is that of Julius Caesar, whose reliability has long been debated. The druids were credited with teaching the immortality of the soul and with officiating at sacrifices. The familiar modern image of white robes, oak groves, mistletoe and a golden sickle derives largely from a single passage of Pliny the Elder.
The druids declined after the Roman conquest of Gaul and were the object of imperial prohibitions in the 1st century CE, after which they faded from the Continental record. In Ireland, which Rome never reached, and more rarely in Wales, medieval literature preserves many druids, but these accounts are now generally read as literary constructs of their Christian authors rather than as reliable evidence for pre-Christian religion.
From the 16th century onward the druids became a screen for successive reinterpretations: noble monotheist philosophers of Renaissance humanism, the supposed builders of Stonehenge, bards of the Romantic imagination, and, in the present day, figures of a modern Druidry and Celtic neo-paganism that has no genuine continuity with the ancient priesthood. Modern scholarship accepts the druids as a real priestly and learned order of the Iron Age Celts, while stressing how little about them can be established with confidence.
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